News from the Goolag Since 2006 ~ A survival guide to the creative apocalypse: We follow issues and opinion important to professional creators. Data is the new exposure.

Spotify Spin Machine is In FUD Overdrive on Apple Music Subscribers

Cooke suggested that artists can flex their promotional weight [to help Spotify get to IPO?]: “When you see those blogs of artists saying ‘my Spotify royalties aren’t enough’. It’s not that your Spotify royalties are not enough. It’s that there aren’t enough Spotify users,” he said. [Yes, that’s right. Ask not what Spotify can do for you, ask what you can do for Spotify.]

“Artists have fans, artists have audience, artists can be encouraging. How many artist websites when you go there say ‘go to Spotify, sign up with this button’… Everybody in the music industry needs more people subscribing to these services.”

From Music Ally, quoting Complete Music Update’s Chris Cooke drumming up business for Spotify at a Music Managers Forum meeting in London announcing the MMF’s downstream streaming royalty analysis deflecting artist attention away from low royalties at Spotify.

Shhh.. be careful who you talk to about this or Spotify’s Washington, DC revolving doorman and chief triangulator Jonathan Prince will ask his chums in the Obama Administration to include you in the FTC investigation of Apple Music. Here’s a fact you won’t read from the Spotify fanboys at Complete Music Update or Spotify leaker The Verge: Apple Music got 6.5 million subscribers in 90 days, about one-third of the subscribers that Spotify converted in seven years.

Another difference–Spotify sold itself to the creative community on the basis that it would be fighting piracy by converting at a much higher rate (including piracy promoted by Daniel Ek’s former employer uTorrent). Of course, it’s pretty hard to know what that conversion rate really is at Spotify–whose “free trials” are the butt of late night TV jokes. But whatever it is, it’s taken seven years (to the day) to get to 20 million subs, a number that Apple is on track to equal in short order.

Ask yourself this–however long it takes Apple Music to surpass Spotify, do you think it will take seven years? When did it take Apple seven years to do anything?